Excerpt: For now, though, Walker's appeal seems to have expanded
farther afield than his own backyard. We're eleven months away from primary
season -- insert requisite clichés about "eternities in
politics," etc. here -- and Scott Walker is on top in Iowa and New
Hampshire:

Excerpt: One of the reasons that Romney lost is that he
failed to take on the media. The ultimate lost opportunity came when CNN’s
debate moderator Candy Crowley directly inserted herself into the argument
between Obama and Romney to declare her favorite right and Romney wrong.

Romney had won the Republican primaries, but had failed to
absorb the lesson of his most tenacious opponent. Newt Gingrich did not treat
the media as a neutral moderator, but as a debate opponent, challenging its
premises and agendas. And so Romney was left unprepared for Crowley’s attack.

Excerpt: Check out this interview. It’s about Obama’s
new tax-and-spend budget,
but pay particular attention at the 5:15 mark of the video and you’ll hear
Maher asserting that “socialism” deserves the credit for the development of a
thriving middle class in America.

Wow. Maher’s comments are astonishingly illiterate. As I
remarked in the interview, the United
States (like other western nations) had a
tiny public sector during the period when it transitioned from agricultural
poverty to middle-class prosperity.

Excerpt: In the big picture, everyone benefits from free
trade. International trade broadens the population within which the division of
labor — that fundamental concept upon which modern economies are based — takes
place. In every moment of the last thousand years, human prosperity has
advanced precisely to the extent that people have abandoned self-sufficiency
and moved toward economic interdependence. A world in which every person milks
his own cow and makes his own clothes will always be an impoverished world.
(Adam Smith said that the three hallmarks of a prosperous people were pursuit
of self interest, division of labor and free trade [both internal and external]
~Bob)

Excerpt: The Vietnamese regime is extremely paranoid over
organized religion, for it competes with and is in direct opposition to the
political religion of communism. The regime’s greatest fears are
Christianity and Buddhism. In 2001, Christian Montagnards in the Central
Highlands of Vietnam
held mass demonstrations seeking the right to worship freely. This triggered
severe crackdowns by the repressive communist regime that resulted in large
numbers of Montagnards killed, thousands of others arrested, tortured and
imprisoned, many of whom remain so today. After the protests, thousands of
Montagnards fled the brutality and sought asylum in neighboring Cambodia causing an international political
embarrassment and change in Vietnam’s
communist party leadership.

Excerpt: The case of former CBS News investigative
correspondent Sharyl Attkisson offers the latest evidence that the Senate’s
freshly demoted minority party still has some mad skills in the spinning
hardball department. Attkisson—whose hard-edged reports on Obama
administration missteps deeply angered officials and elected Democrats loyal to
the president—got a taste of payback last week when she appeared before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. (Democrats who work by defaming those who expose how
they operate are hard at work on a CBS reporter who left for not permitting her
investigation of the Obama administration to be aired. After her recent damning
testimony in Congress, they released a report before evaluation that seemed to
deny her computer had been hacked and then sent to the media information
ridiculing her. The former CBS correspondent’s lawyer says investigators looked
at the wrong computer when concluding that she hadn’t, as she claims, been
hacked. Evidently the investigators had been directed to look at Attkisson's
personal computer rather than the hacked computer which was her work computer
that CBS said they would protect and on which a hired expert managed to find
the source of the government hack. If you want to see the depravity of
liberals, read the enclosed to see how far they will go against any opposition
and how they treat those that do. --John)

Excerpt: Secretary of the Army John McHugh announced Friday
that victims of the 2009 FortHood massacre will
receive the Purple Heart, in an about-face for the military which initially
described the attacks as "workplace violence." The decision to award
the Purple Heart was first reported by Fox News. In a written statement, McHugh
cited a recent change in the law that allowed the Army to proceed with the
medals.

Excerpt: The U.S. Army’s preparatory course
for the next Ranger School cycle
ended with 5 out of 26 women completing the course. All were officers. Out of
122 soldiers to start the course, 48 percent passed. There were 43 male
dropouts in addition to the 21 women, Army Times reported Wednesday. (That course is to prep national
guard guys, not regular army, because before that the NG's failure rate was so
outrageously high. --TK. Questionable. Anyway, the only "women"
that would have any sort of chance of legitimately completing this course,
BUDs, or the USMC's Infantry Officers Course were the "female" East
German Olympic athletes of the 60s and 70s. They were juiced, they were pumped;
literally. --Andy)

Excerpt: In a rare reversal, however, Golsteyn, now a
major, no longer has either award. The officer, a former member of the 3rd
Special Forces Group and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.,
was later investigated for an undisclosed violation of the military’s rules of
engagement in combat for killing a known enemy fighter and bomb maker,
according to officials familiar with the case. The investigation closed last
year without Golsteyn’s being charged with a crime, but Army Secretary John M.
McHugh decided not only to deny Golsteyn the Distinguished Service Cross, but
also to revoke his Silver Star. (Shameful! Sure glad I served when I did. We
now have a politicized military. Cowards is the correct assessment. --GBH
MajGen, Ret.)

Excerpt: You know you’re in trouble
when Tom Brokaw is out for
your blood. NBC’s most revered journalist is furious that Brian Williams is
still in the anchor chair after he sheepishly admitted he hadn’t traveled on a
helicopter hit by enemy fire. “Brokaw wants Williams’ head on a platter,” an
NBC source said. “He is making a lot of noise at NBC that a lesser journalist
or producer would have been immediately fired or suspended for a false report.”

The Williams story strikes me as something far less than the
Greatest Story Ever. It’s really kind of sad and pathetic. Some people
embellish stories, lots and lots of people. The fish always gets bigger. The
girl at the bar gets hotter. The other guy in the fight gets tougher. At some
point the embellishments cover up the original, like layers of graffiti. That’s
what Williams did. Don’t get me wrong. He lied and his apology minimized the
size and duration of the lie. But the nature of the lie wasn’t nearly as bad as
those of countless others who yoked deceit to a partisan agenda or for
political gain. He was trying to praise the military and wanted a little more
of their glory to rub off on him. Compared to Richard Blumenthal using his
fictitious claim of serving in Vietnam to bolster his foreign-policy bona
fides; or John Kerry embellishing his own record to denigrate the U.S. military
and our country; or Bill Clinton lying about so, so, so many things, Williams’s
lie is just a sad case of an overpaid front man for the peacock network trying
to add some brightly colored feathers to his plumage. ... On the one hand, if
he was really counseled and kept doing it, then he’s got real problems. On
the other hand, I don’t take NBC News seriously, and having damaged goods in
the anchor chair might be a good thing. Rarely am I so torn about an issue that
matters so little.

Only 44 Percent Of U.S.
Adults Are Employed For 30 Or More Hours Per Week. By Michael Snyder

Excerpt: Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, says that the
percentage of Americans that are employed full-time has been hovering near record
lows since the end of the last recession. But most Americans don’t realize this
because the official unemployment numbers are extremely misleading. In fact, Clifton says that the
official 5.6 percent unemployment rate is a “big lie”.

Last year, Barack Obama broadened the
"Pay As You Earn" student-debt federal giveaway. As usual, it was a
wealth-transfer scheme -- giving taxpayer money away to the coveted votes of
young people. Even Obama's buddies at Politico are astounded at the cost of his
"generosity." Michael Grunwald reports, "In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget
proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan
program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever
recorded for any government credit program." Worse, "because of a
quirk in the budget process for credit programs, the [Education] department can
add the $21.8 billion to the deficit automatically, without seeking
appropriations or even approval from Congress." Like every other program
Obama calls for, he wants to "pay for it" by taking money from upper-bracket
taxpayers. "This should be a no-brainer," he said last summer.
"It would be scandalous if we allowed those kinds of tax loopholes for the
very, very fortunate to survive while students are having trouble just getting
started in their lives." In other words, it's his money to
dispense with as he pleases. The real scandal is that Obama has dumped an $8
trillion truckload of new debt onto the backs of our children and grandchildren
-- all while claiming a mantle of fiscal responsibility. Our national debt now
stands at an astounding $18.1 trillion. That's more than $145,000
per American household. And he's not done yet.

Excerpt: Many college administrators love to tout their
commitment to diversity. Implicitly, they almost always
mean racial diversity—and said commitment usually takes the form of
endless, shallow discussions about how important diversity is. Top officials at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
are no different; they really want to have a dialogue about diversity, as long
as that dialogue only includes people who already share the campus's dominant,
left-of-center views on what diversity entails. Chancellor Carol Folt recently
met with 40 student leaders to discuss campus diversity issues—but it never
occurred to her to include a single libertarian, conservative, or otherwise
non-liberal voice, according to The College Fix: In fact, right-leaning
organizations including the UNC College Republicans, Carolina Students for
Life, UNC Young Americans for Liberty, the Tar Heel Rifle and Pistol Club, and
Christians United For Israel were not even aware of the dinner until
the Daily Tar Heel wrote an article about it the next day. (This is almost funny. A
dinner to celebrate diversity on campus that brings in a very limited and
closely related bunch of student organizations. Almost as funny as the
"diversity" among the faculty, who vote 80% or more Democrat. You
see, it's important to have diversity, as long as you are careful to not let in
any of those who might otherwise disturb the consensus of the people whose
views are really important. --Del. Nothing new here. Back when I was majoring
in government at U-Mass [70-72], the PolySci faculty had one conservative
Republican, one moderate Republican and the rest were divided between Liberal
Democrats and Socialists. ~Bob)

Important: Scam Alert

Even more clever than the USAA fraud is the Google fraud
(I've been pinged on twice). In it you receive an email saying that Google has
blocked an attempt by someone (they give an ISP address in someplace near you
or abroad) to use your password to access your Google account. It looks
extremely real -- except for two things: They have pictures of you culled from
your website or Facebook page (nothing Google would do, but it makes you think
the email must be okay) and then they include a link to a page where they ask
you for your password. Google NEVER asks for your data or your password --
hell, they already have it all! The scam is well-written and the logos look
legitimate. I have reported it to Google, but nothing replaces caution. When in
doubt -- do not answer the guy on the other side of the wire who says,
"Pssst! Are you there, Joe?" The incoming round following your reply
can empty your bank account. Ever, Chet Nagle, Author of LazarusMan.
(I finished Lazarus Man, by Naval
Aviator, former CIA Agent and blog contributor Chet Nagle last night. Terrific
novel. I'll do a review as soon as I get a breather. ~Bob)

Excerpt: So how do we approach matters that have been
settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by liberals? Take
vaccines. There is little proof that conservatives are any less inclined to
vaccinate their children than anyone else. If we’re interested in politicizing
the controversy, though, there is a good case to be made for the opposite. For
starters, polls show that Millennials (most of whom lean liberal) are far more skeptical
about vaccines than are older Americans.

Excerpt: A doctor who was profiled by The New York Times for
his close personal and professional relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton
has expressed skepticism about vaccines and touted research that found a link
between childhood vaccinations and autism. ... Though Christie and Paul did
question a vaccination mandate on philosophical terms, it is Clinton who has
more personal associations with vaccination skeptics and anti-vaxxers. In 2008,
both Clinton
and then-Sen. Obama told the anti-vaccination group Advocates for
Children’s Health Affected by Mercury Poisoning that they supported the removal
of thimerosal from all vaccines. ("The science is clear: The earth is
round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let's protect all our kids."
Like any good two-faced leftist, Hillary was singing a different tune in 2008
when she promised to "make investments to find the causes of autism,
including possible environmental causes like vaccines." From The Patriot
Post www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/)

Excerpt: New
Mexico residents already face high electricity rates
compared to others in their region, and those prices will only rise. In a
report from the Rio Grande Foundation, the Beacon Hill Institute has analyzed
the impact of new EPA regulations on New
Mexico. The results? Lost jobs and higher electricity
bills for New Mexico's
residents.

Religion of Peace News

Must See: America’s First
Afghan & Iraq War Vet to Become Senator Lights Up the Obama Administration
on GITMO Policy By Justen Charters

Excerpt: “How many detainees in GuantanamoBay
are engaging in terrorism or anti-American incitement? They’re not because
they’re detained, because they only engage in that kind of recidivism
overseas. Now lets look at the propaganda value, how many detainees were at GuantanamoBay on September 11th, 2001? How many
were there in October 2000, when Al-Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole? What about in
1998 when they bombed our embassies?…

Islamic terrorists don’t need an excuse to attack the United States.
They don’t attack us for what they do, they attack us for who we are.

Excerpt: As far as Tom Cotton is concerned, Guantanamo detainees can
"rot in hell."

That's how the freshman Republican senator from Arkansas
responded Thursday morning to testimony by Principal Deputy Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Brian McKeon, who said the detention facility has
become a recruitment tool for terrorists, is hugely expensive to operate, and
needs to be shut down. Doing so, McKeon said, is a "national security
imperative" for the Obama administration.

Boehner Expects New
AUMF From White House 'In a Matter of Days. By Luke Russert

Excerpt: As the battle against ISIS continues in the Middle
East, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said Thursday that he expects the White
House to send Congress a new authorization for a use of military force
agreement within a "matter of days." Since President Barack Obama
announced airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq
and Syria
in early September, Boehner -- as well as some Senate Democrats -- have called
on the administration to send forward a new AUMF that offers a specific plan to
combat the terrorist group. Boehner told NBC News that passage of the first
AUMF to combat terrorism since 2001 would not be an "easy lift" and
that it was "going to be incumbent upon the president to go out there and
make the case to the American people for why we have to fight this fight."
(I suggest Congress authorize the use of force to "destroy the Islamic
Terrorist group ISIS." ~Bob)

Excerpt: The Obama
administration this year turned down a request from Jordan for Predator spy
drones that would help it locate targets in the war against the Islamic State.
The refusal, disclosed by a House Armed Services Committee member, has gained
attention since Jordan has
emerged as a critical player in a U.S.-led coalition to destroy the Islamist
terrorist group in the days after it released a video of its execution by fire
of a captured Jordanian military pilot.

ISIS Claims an
American Hostage, Kayla Mueller, Died in Airstrike in Syria

Excerpt: The Islamic State claimed Friday that the Jordanian
bombings in northern Syria
intended to avenge its immolation of a captured pilot had killed an American
woman held hostage by the group. An Islamic State message published by the SITE
Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist activity, said the American woman,
Kayla Mueller, was killed when the building where she was being held in the
Raqqa area collapsed in an airstrike. (Ten to one they killed her--or have made
her a sex slave--and using this to try to drive a wedge between us and Jordan.
~Bob)

Excerpt: An Islamic State cleric who objected to the group's
decision to burn to death a captive Jordanian pilot has been removed from his
post and will be put on trial, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on
Friday.

Excerpt: I am an atheist author and poet, who had lived as a
Sunni Muslim for 23 years from birth, and I am still living in a Muslim
country, Turkey.
Also, my parents and all of my relatives are still Muslim. So, my critics about
Islam can be easily consider this an inside view. I know that the title of this
essay seems assertive, but I will explain the rightness of this title
step-by-step in this essay. First of all, you have to learn about Islam that if
you are an “outsider”, a non-Muslim, for example, a Christian, an atheist, a
Buddhist, a Jew or whatever else, all Muslims have the “right” of killing and
raping you, grabbing all your properties, your country, land, money and
anything else. They take this “right” from the book of their belief, the Quran.
In other words, they take this “right” from their belief’s core, the theology
of Islam.

NPR

2 stories on NPR this evening, interesting in their
contrast: The first centered on the rise of right wing parties in Sweden,
and their overt islamophobia. Absolutely no mention of WHY they might feel this
way; no discussion of the crime, welfare state, lack of assimilation, and rise
in anti-Semitism. Similarly, they reported on the rise of anti-Semitism in England, but no
discussion of the perpetrators of that hatred. --George

Iran: The ‘Americans
Are Begging Us for a Deal.’ ‘Iran
prepares itself for war with global powers.’ By Adam Kredo

Excerpt: A top Iranian military leader claims that U.S. officials have been “begging us” to sign a
nuclear deal during closed door negotiations with Tehran over its contested nuclear program,
according to recent comments made to the Iranian state-controlled media.

Mohammad Reza Naghdi, the commander of the Basij,
a paramilitary group operating under the wing of the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corp (IRGC), recently claimed that the “Americans are begging us for a
deal on the negotiation table,” according to comments published in
Persian and independently translated for the Washington Free Beacon.

Worth Reading.
Obama: Christianity No Different From the
Islamic State. By Raymond Ibrahim

Excerpt: As the world reacts with shock and horror at the
increasingly savage deeds of the Islamic State (IS)—in this case, the
recent immolation of a captive—U.S. President Obama’s response has been one
of nonjudgmental relativism. Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on
February 5, Obama counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and
remember that Christians have been equally guilty of such atrocities: (The
first "crusade" was the Muslim one to conquer Europe
and extinguish Christianity. They over ran Catholic Spain very early on, and
were advancing into Europe when Charles Martel
and his Christian knights turned them back in 732. The Crusades were an attempt
by Christians to reverse the Muslim conversion of the Holy
Land to Islam by the sword. And at the Battle of Lepanto, October
7, 1751, Don John of Austria
and a Christian fleet destroyed a Muslim fleet intent on over-running Europe. In the process, they freed as many as 7,500
Christian galley slaves held in the worst sort of bondage by the Muslims. Note
that Dr. Thomas Sowell says in the time period when 500,000 African slaves were
brought to North America, 1,000,000 white Christian Europeans were kidnapped
into slavery in Muslim lands in North Africa.
When do we get our reparations? ~Bob)

Excerpt: On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a
slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel
cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various “mass
executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children,
and burying children alive” at the hands of the Islamic State. And on Thursday,
President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to
forthrightly criticize the “terrible deeds” . . . committed
“in the name of Christ.”

By Michael Chapman, CNS News In response to President Barack
Obama drawing a parallel between the barbaric acts of the Islamic State today
with actions by Christians during the Crusades, which ended 700 years ago,
evangelist Franklin Graham said there was a difference between Jesus Christ who
“taught peace “ and did “not take life” versus Mohammed, who “was a warrior and
killed many innocent people.” (​"I have been made victorious through
terror" (Bukhari 4.52.220) --Mohammad.)

Excerpt: Addressing the National Prayer
Breakfast Thursday, President Obama admonished his audience not to get on a “high horse”
about Islamic terrorists (of course he did not name them) since atrocities had
been committed in the name of many religions or, as he put it more
specifically, “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some
other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people
committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country,
slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” Well,
that doesn’t mean me. As a Jew, I’m exempt from anything done “in the name of
Christ.” But frankly I was appalled by what Obama said. Many faiths could be
cited, including communism, obviously, also a kind of religion that was
responsible for exponentially more deaths — via Stalin’s Gulag, Mao’s Cultural
Revolution and Great Leap Forward, the killing fields of Cambodia, etc. — than all other belief
systems combined, although none of them are doing it now. Right now it’s
Islamic radicalism that just the other day placed a human being in a cage and
burned him alive, an act not, to my knowledge, even performed by Dr. Mengele. And
it was done in the name of Allah. (First, he stepped in it good and proper this
time, with possibly one of the most inane and offensive statements he's made in
a while, inferring equivalence between Christianity
and radical Islam, hey everybody did bad things, so get over it, OK? (You
wonder if he really has no adviser anywhere with a working brain to warn
him off such blunders.) But this explanation about his attitudes is another
good possibility for understanding his mistakes. I don't know for sure it
applies, but it definitely could. --Del)

Excerpt: Despite the current focus on ISIS, the ongoing
barbarity inflicted against the Yazidis, a group of people who have inhabitedIraq’s mountainous northwestern
region for centuries, remains largely below the radar. And while this estimated
population of approximately 500,000 has been the target of hatred by Muslims
who see them as heretical devil-worshipers, ISIS
has upped the ante. While the world largely looks away, a genocidal level of
extermination proceeds apace. “Our entire religion is being wiped off the face
of the earth,” warned Yazidi leader Vian Dakhil—last August.

Excerpt: A senior cleric for al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen was killed along with three other people
in a drone strike on their vehicle January 31 in Yemen,
al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said
Thursday. The cleric, Harith
bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, was killed in Yemen's south-central Shabwa
province, AQAP said.

Obama's Yemen
"Success.": Yemen's
Houthi rebels take over government in coup

Excerpt: Yemen's
Shia Houthi rebels have announced that they have dissolved parliament and
installed a five-member "presidential council" which will form a
transitional government to govern for two years. In a televised statement on
Friday from the RepublicanPalace in the capital,
Sanaa, the rebel group said that it would set up a transitional national
council of 551 members to replace the dissolved legislature.

Excerpt: Turkey
has long fought Kurdish insurgents within its borders, and the country now
faces a severe jihadist threat in part due to Ankara’s
reckless policy of allowing jihadists to exploit its border with Syria. Yet it’s
a little-known far-left terrorist outfit that has recently emerged as Turkey’s most
active terror threat, and nobody seems to have noticed.

Between 1989 and 2004, Israel
absorbed nearly 1 million immigrants from the former Soviet
Union. They have profoundly affected Israel and they themselves have
been transformed by achieving and enjoying freedom. Cordially, Larry Greenberg